Does Positive Reinforcement Work?: A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Effects of Positive Feedback on Reddit

要旨

Social media platform design often incorporates explicit signals of positive feedback. Some moderators provide positive feedback with the goal of positive reinforcement, but are often unsure of their ability to actually influence user behavior. Despite its widespread use and theory touting positive feedback as crucial for user motivation, its effect on recipients is relatively unknown. This paper examines how positive feedback impacts Reddit users and evaluates its differential effects to understand who benefits most from receiving positive feedback. Through a causal inference study of 11M posts across 4 months, we find that users who received positive feedback made more frequent (2\% per day) and higher quality (57\% higher score; 2\% fewer removals per day) posts compared to a set of matched control users. Our findings highlight the need for platforms, communities, and moderators to expand their perspective on moderation and complement punitive approaches with positive reinforcement strategies to foster desirable behavior online.

著者
Charlotte Lambert
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States
Koustuv Saha
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States
Eshwar Chandrasekharan
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States
DOI

10.1145/3706598.3713830

論文URL

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713830

動画

会議: CHI 2025

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)

セッション: Writing Support and Content Moderation

G416+G417
7 件の発表
2025-04-29 20:10:00
2025-04-29 21:40:00
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